BRIAN Cashman better be right. Phil Hughes better be special. Not good. Special.
Because if Hughes is just another pitcher, dependable but not dominant, then he might find himself spending his time in New York hearing who he is not – namely, that he is not Johan Santana.
And Cashman will soon be the ex-GM of the Yankees.
Let’s put it this way: If Johan Santana is 10-2 in June and Hughes is on the DL again or back at Triple-A or explaining the growing pains that have led to his 4-6 record and 4.87 ERA, then you can expect few Yankee fans to still be on the bandwagon about entrusting young pitchers.
And you can expect Hank Steinbrenner to be Bossy. You can expect Son of Slam to be channeling his father with a hailstorm of “I told you so.”
As autopsies are being performed now to explain how the Mets ended up obtaining Johan Santana (pending a signed extension), there is little doubt Hughes is the player the Twins wanted most in all their trade discussions. And there was a moment in December they could have had him plus Melky Cabrera, Jeff Marquez and Mitch Hilligoss.
But in a “greed is bad” moment, the Twins wanted more, namely Ian Kennedy. They speculated the Yanks would never really leave the bidding. However, Andy Pettitte shunned retirement and the Yanks pulled their offer. They never made another one. On Monday, Minnesota called to say Hughes could be removed from the offer if Kennedy and Chien-Ming Wang were the replacements. The Yanks hated that idea, too.
So in an attempt to move the B-plus offers of the Yanks and Red Sox to A-plus, the Twins ended up with a C-minus package from the Mets, the last team standing. This had happened once before. After the 2004 season, the Yanks decided they had the money for either Randy Johnson or Carlos Beltran, and opted for Johnson. Beltran’s agent, Scott Boras, then – like Minnesota now – always believed the Yanks would eventually get back into talks. They didn’t.
At the last moment, Boras even offered a gigantic discount to the Yanks, who still refused. With no place else to exceed $100 million, Beltran fell into the Mets’ lap.
Good for the Mets. Persistence and fortune matter in life and baseball.
Johnson, though, was a Yankee mistake. Beltran would have been a better choice. Johnson proved to be part of another class of failed veteran starters imported that offseason – along with Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright – that finally convinced Cashman the Yanks had to stop chasing this ilk and fully invest, instead, in high-end young pitching.
Cashman won a power struggle that offseason and gained a three-year extension based on a plan to protect touted arms already in the organization, such as Hughes, and find more in the draft and internationally such as Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain.
It was absolutely the right path. But it misses a fact about the arms the Yanks had chased recently. This has been a group that has been too old (Johnson, Kevin Brown, Roger Clemens last year) or full of too much guesswork/projection (Jose Contreras, Javier Vazquez, Jeff Weaver, Pavano). Santana is a prime-age ace. He is great. No guesswork. As an executive from another club said, “If I had to gamble on one pitcher to be great the next six years, I would bet on Santana.”
Cashman did not want to make that bet, not at the cost of Hughes and a contract that would swell the payroll to about $230M, tie them to a starter for seven years.
However, that three-year contract Cashman signed ends after this year. That ties his administration – his survival in the job – more to these young pitchers, Hughes in particular, than ever before. Hank Steinbrenner already is offering “make the playoffs or else” proclamations. Again, imagine Santana on a Cy Young track in Flushing, and Hughes on the Scranton shuttle from The Bronx.
“These decisions are not being made for what is the best interest of Brian Cashman,” Cashman said. “I am paid for recommendations. I made my recommendation. The people above me and the fan base get to judge me.”
All that is riding on the recommendation is the immediate future of the Yankees and their GM.